Gear with arrows in menu bar on iPad
What is this symbol in the menu bar on my iPad? It showed up after I downloaded a document from Safari, but hasn’t gone away. How do I get rid of it?
iPad
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The icon indicates that your iPad is synchronising with "something". Yours is one of many reports seen in recent days. At present, pending confirmation by Apple, this icon is believed to have some relationship to post-update synchronisation tasks performed by your iPad after updating to iPadOS 18.x. I too have seen this icon appear for a short period - but have not since observed a repeat appearance
Apple's documentation is often slow to catch-up with new features. Here is another status icon - that appears briefly when connecting some USB-C hubs - that Apple have yet to add to their documentation: